"Some time ago, his followers, his clowns, returned to haunt me. They lurked in the darker corners of building sites masquerading as foreign construction workers. As I passed looming edifices of unfinished concrete and steel, I heard them giggling. I had this sense I was being watched. I was almost certain someone followed me armed with a custard cream pie. One day, in the middle of a crowded underpass on the way to the MRT station at Raffles Place, I stopped and turned around abruptly. Amidst the flurry of movement I was sure I caught a glimpse of orange curly hair and a red blur on someone’s face. Those clowns were at it again. In the crowded MRT carriage, as the train stopped at Dhoby Ghaut, just as the doors opened and people flooded out, someone grabbed at my head and tore a clump of hair out. I did not, could not, see who had viciously attacked me. There were too many bobbing heads, and I was overcome by so many unknown faces. There were too many people, too close together, and everyone was a stranger."

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."